The purpose of this conference is to bring scientists working in the area of microbial active transport up-to-date on the status of periplasmic space-related active transport systems. This is a field of burgeoning interest both from the basic research and from the applied point of view. Active transport systems have been implicated in the transport of antibiotics and other drugs into cells, and mechanisms of drug-resistance can often be related to the occurrence of mutants which have lost the transport systems. "Illicit transport" (also known as "smuggling of drugs") is an area of extreme interest to people involved in the design of new drug derivatives such that they can be "smuggled" through the existing microbial transport systems. The mechanism of active transport is one of the important unsolved problems for both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell biochemistry.